The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (72 page)

“Stonecutters Island?” said the sergeant. “That doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing on Stonecutters Island.”

Lehman flew over the road which ran around the island and climbed up into the green hills at its centre. He saw a large field with no buildings or livestock and he flew in a large circle around the area to check that there was no traffic in the air or on the tracks around the field. When he was satisfied that there was nothing nearby he eased off on the collective and circled down to the field, flaring at the last minute so that the skids brushed the grass and the Huey settled down. He left the rotors turning and unbuckled his harness. Doherty climbed out of his seat as Lehman dashed around to see how Lewis was. Horvitz shook his head. Lehman climbed up and knelt on the metal floor and looked down on his dying friend. The wound in his neck was still spurting blood despite a pad of cloth Horvitz had pushed against it. It was soaked, and so was the front of Lewis’s shirt, and blood was trickling from either side of his mouth. The man’s eyes refocused and he pulled back his lips as he saw Lehman above him. His teeth were red as if he’d been drinking cranberry juice. “Dan …” he said, his voice little more than a moan.

“I’m here, Bart,” said Lehman, taking one of the man’s big hands in his own. The flesh felt cold and waxy and had little strength left in it.

“Don’t forget my boy,” wheezed Lewis, his eyelids fluttering. Lehman felt the chilled hand squeeze once and then go still. The eyelids stopped moving and the chest shuddered once and then went as still as the hand.

“I won’t, Bart. I promise,” whispered Lehman.

“What’s going on, Dan?” asked Horvitz, who was leaning against the back of the co-pilot’s seat with his M16 on the floor next to him.

“We’ve been betrayed, right from the start,” said Lehman.

“What are you talking about?” said Carmody.

“This whole operation has been a fake from day one. Tyler set us up so that he could betray us.”

“What?” said Horvitz, stunned.

“It’s true,” said Doherty. “We’ve been monitoring the police frequencies on our radio. A man answering Tyler’s description is tied up with what looks like robbery in Kowloon. A bank job.”

“That’s crazy,” said Horvitz. “If there was a job he wanted to do in Kowloon, he’d use us.”

“Not if he expected us to get caught,” said Lehman. “Not if he wanted to use us as bait.”

“Bait?” said Carmody. “What do you mean, bait?”

“How many police do you think were waiting for us at the track?” said Lehman. “There were marksmen all around the place, and I bet the track was swamped with plain-clothes cops. I bet they’ve got the roads sealed off, too.”

“Why would they seal off the roads if they knew we were using a helicopter?” asked Carmody, frowning.

“Maybe they didn’t know about the Huey, just that there was going to be a robbery,” said Doherty. “There’s something else. Both cross-harbour tunnels have been wrecked. That effectively seals off the island. All the police there are stuck. Hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“Unless someone wanted to keep all the cops on the island while they robbed a bank in Kowloon,” added Lehman.

“One more thing,” said Doherty. “Our warehouse has gone up in flames.”

“And you think the colonel did that?” asked Carmody.

“Jesus, Larry, will you try and get the big picture on this,” said Lehman. “We’ve just flown into a hail of lead, there was no sign of Tyler at the RV, a man answering his description is driving his car in Kowloon, our warehouse is on fire and half of Hong Kong’s finest are marooned on the island.”

Horvitz nodded and ran a hand through his beard. Lehman looked at his reflection in Horvitz’s glasses. “What about you, Eric? You convinced?”

Horvitz nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’m convinced.” He looked over Lehman’s shoulder at Lewis. “We gonna get the bastard?”

“That’s what we’ve got to decide. Larry, what about you?”

Carmody hefted his M16 on his hip. “Let’s go see if we can find him. If he really is in Kowloon, I say we waste the fucker.”

“Chuck?”

“You know what I think, Dan. It explains the tapping, that’s for sure.”

“Tapping?” said Horvitz, frowning.

“It’s personal,” said Lehman. “Okay, that’s unanimous. Chuck, do you have an idea where we’ll find him?”

“Last I heard, the cop was still following him. He’ll be calling in his position, and we’ve got maps. We’ll find him.”

“Okay,” said Lehman. “We go.”

“Rock and roll,” said Carmody, slotting in a new clip of cartridges, “let’s do it.”

“What about Bart?” said Doherty. “Do we leave him here?”

Horvitz looked at the body. “Not here,” he said. “Over the water, that’s all we can do. We don’t have time for a burial.” He saw Lehman looking at him. “I’m sorry, we just don’t have time.”

“I understand,” said Lehman. He nodded. “We have to go.” Doherty climbed back into his seat and began buckling his harness. Lehman walked quickly around the Huey, checking the extent of the damage. There were fresh bullet holes, more than a dozen in all, but the damage was mainly superficial. Horvitz and Carmody clambered back into the Huey and Lehman buckled himself in and ran his eyes over the instruments and gauges. When he was satisfied he pulled on the collective and took the Huey up, circling around before heading east, over the crowded streets of Kowloon.

Neil Coleman was having trouble keeping up with the Mercedes. The driver seemed to have the knack of knowing just which lane to be in, and without appearing to break the speed limit it was soon twenty cars ahead of Coleman’s Jeep.

The Toyota was driving along the same road, heading east, and the inspector was just half a dozen vehicles ahead, stuck behind a cream and red minibus. Coleman reached for his radio mike and called Kowloon East Emergency Unit, asking them if they had any men to check out the depository. The officer on duty told him that they had just received an anonymous telephone call that a man had been shot during a robbery there and that they were already sending a team over. Coleman sighed with relief after hearing confirmation that he really was on to something. He radioed a description of the Mercedes and the Toyota and said that he was in pursuit.

“Which direction are they headed?” he was asked.

“East,” he said, “towards Tolo Highway.”

Coleman was told that all the cars were tied up at the cross-harbour tunnel disasters but that they’d send the first available one as back-up. Ahead of him he saw the Toyota and the Mercedes continuing along the road, towards the coast. Coleman suddenly recalled the last time he’d been in the area, when he’d masterminded the capture of the car smuggling gang. He now knew he’d been looking at the fleeing car from the wrong perspective: he’d been wondering what it was doing leaving the bank building rather than concentrating on where it was going. It was going towards the sea, and that meant a boat. And presumably that was where the other nine Mercs had gone.

He retuned his radio to 52.650 MHz, the frequency used by the Marine Police in the east of the New Territories, and identified himself. To his surprise there was an expatriate inspector on duty, a Liverpudlian named Guy Williamson he remembered meeting once at a leaving party in the police social club. Coleman explained where he was and that he was in pursuit of a car which could have been involved in a robbery at the Kowloon and Canton Bank and which was now heading for Tolo Harbour. “Can you get a boat to Ma Liu Shui, on the coast, in about ten minutes? I’ll meet it there and we should be able to cut them off once they’ve loaded the car.”

“You’re sure they’re going to put it on a boat?” asked Henderson.

“There’s nowhere else they can go,” said Coleman. “There’s a Toyota, too. He’s probably arranged to meet a boat as well. Guy, how many launches have you got near the Tolo Channel at the moment?”

“The one I’m sending to pick you up, Neil. That’s it at the moment. Cutbacks, you know. Smuggling is pretty low on the Commissioner’s priority list.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. Well, his cutbacks have probably lost us the first nine Mercs. I bet they’re already in Chinese waters. How much gold do you think a top-of-the-range Merc could carry, Guy?”

“A hell of a lot, I suppose. Okay, Neil, let me talk to the boat. Ten minutes, right?”

“Ten minutes it is.”

The Merc was about a quarter of a mile ahead of him, but Coleman turned off the road and headed towards Ma Liu Shui. He radioed Kowloon East Emergency Unit again and told them he was leaving the Merc and heading straight to the coast. He was told there was still no car available, but that as soon as one was free they’d head out to Tolo Highway.

Doherty pressed the trigger to activate his radio mike. “You hear that?”

“I heard it,” replied Lehman. “Can you find Tolo Highway on the map?”

Doherty had a sectional chart of the airport and its surroundings, and a large-scale road map of the area. They were fluttering in the wind and he folded them as best he could and kept them pressed to his knees as he scanned them, looking for the roads they’d heard the police inspector name on the radio. Lehman flew at less than a hundred feet over the container terminals of Kwai Chung, then kept as low as he could over the apartment blocks and high-rise factories of Tsuen Wan. He increased the power so that he’d have enough height to clear the hills that separated the Kowloon peninsula from the rest of the mainland.

“Fly a heading of zero eight five,” said Doherty. “We’re about ten miles from them. I think. Maybe nine.”

Lehman banked the Huey to the right. “Whatever you say, Chuck,” he said.

He levelled the helicopter and took a quick look over his left shoulder. Horvitz was sitting at the back of the Huey, cradling his M16 in his arms like a baby. Carmody was sitting at the side, in the position the doorgunners used to favour, scanning the buildings below. They were alone in the back. The only reminder of Lewis was a red smear on the floor and a pool of glistening blood which rippled with the vibrations of the engine. When they’d left Stonecutters Island Lehman had put the Huey into a hover above the waves and Carmody and Horvitz had weighed the body down with ammunition and rolled it out of the cargo door. There had been no other way. He’d seen many shorter goodbyes in Nam.

Lehman was keeping the Huey as low as possible, hoping to minimise its radar profile, but the rugged hills were causing turbulence that had them rocking and shaking like a roller-coaster. To their right, a thousand feet or so above them, Lehman saw a 747 swooping down, its flaps extended.

“I’ve got it,” he heard Doherty crackle in his ear. “That peak to our left is Needle Hill, and that’s Beacon Hill on our right. At the end of this valley is Shatin. Before you get to the town head up to zero one five, we should see Tolo Harbour ahead of us.”

“Good work, Chuck,” replied Lehman. He was getting the feel of the Huey now and had begun relying less on the instruments and more on how the controls responded. He took the Huey down to within fifty feet of the ground, following the contours of the landscape and increasing his speed. Ahead he saw the high-rise blocks of Shatin, much taller than those of Kowloon because they were well away from the airport. Lehman turned until the heading indicator showed zero one five. Over his headphones he heard the English policeman talking to a Marine Police launch, confirming an RV at Ma Liu Shui.

“Have I got this right?” asked Doherty. “Tyler and this other guy are heading for the sea, and they’re going to be picked up by boats?”

“That’s what it sounds like to me, Chuck. And this policeman is trying to head them off in a police launch.”

“Why don’t they just run him off the road?” asked Doherty.

“All the cops are tied up at the track, I guess,” said Lehman. He was scanning the roads below, looking for a Mercedes followed by a white Toyota. There was little traffic now that they’d left the built-up areas, and there were none of the luxury cars that they’d seen so many of in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Instead there were battered old trucks loaded with farm produce, minibuses and green and grey taxicabs. Below them the Huey’s shadow followed them, its black silhouette flying silently along the ground.

“I think I see them,” said Doherty. “Ten o’clock, about one mile away.”

Lehman pushed his left pedal and eased the cyclic to the left and the nose of the Huey turned anti-clockwise. In the distance he saw a large dark blue Mercedes with darkened windows, and about three hundred yards behind it, a white Toyota. “I see it,” said Lehman. “I’m going to take us closer, to get a better look. Tell the others to look out of the right side. We don’t want to make any mistakes here.”

As Lehman flew the Huey towards the cars, Doherty turned round and by shouting and pointing indicated that the two men in the back should see if they could identify the driver as Tyler. Horvitz gave him a thumbs-up and he and Carmody knelt by the open door, the wind streaming through their hair, their guns at the ready.

Lehman took the Huey to about fifteen feet above the ground and kept to the right of the Toyota and behind it while he matched its speed. The road was a double-lane highway which was heading almost due east, to the sea. North of the road was a hill topped by a rocky outcrop, a fringe of spindly trees around its summit. To the south were uncultivated fields with a sprinkling of small stone buildings which looked like they might once have been homes but which now stood abandoned. The road curved gently to the left and Lehman put the helicopter into a slight bank, scanning the route ahead to make sure there were no obstructions. All it would take would be one stray electricity pylon or telephone cable and it would all be over.